In the following essay, Goyet contends that Akutagawa's short stories are stylistically and thematically situated in-between the standards of Western and Eastern short fiction.

The Japanese did not have a special word for “short story” before the last years of the XIXth century. Up to that time, the same word monogatari was used indifferently: e.g., for the Genji monogatari and its thousands of pages, and for the Ugetsu monogatari of Ueda Akinari, tales of a few pages each. Length had never been a criterion for judging a prose work. Even at the end of the XIXth century, when the opening of the country to the Western world brought about new trends in Japanese literature, the emerging modern...